People with Tattoos in three state get new infection

ATLANTA - A worrisome superbug seen in prisoners and athletes is also showing up in people who get illegal tattoos, federal health officials said
Thursday.

Forty-four tattoo customers in Ohio, Kentucky and Vermont developed skin infections caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA),
according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

...and I havn't gotten any tattoos lately. At the hospital, they were saying that recently in the Seattle area, it was common for a third of the
patients to be in there with a staph infection, it is a small outbreak right now, but nobody's really talking about it.
You do not want to get this, it is VERY painful.

We have no idea where I could have gotten it. I first noticed it when I went to Hawaii in April, but who knows. Lots of people actually have it on
their skin, but their immune systems are typically strong enough to resist an infection.

Headcheck,
you can pick up mrsa from any hard surface that has been colonised with it. All it takes is a nice enviroment to live in, and it will
march on to survive and multiply. You may have shook hands with some one colonised but not infected, you may have picked up a loaf of bread in a
supermarket that a colonised person has lifted up and put back. in short, you may have picked it up any where.

The trouble is, many people do not wash their hands properly, some times not at all - so any thing on them gets spread around. You do not say how you
noticed it - did you have a wound that became infected or breaks in the skin? because mrsa cannot break a healthy skin barrrier to infect you.

Vancomicin is used here in the UK to treat it, along with other 'super' antibiotics, but the real problem will be when we develope a V MRSA. When
vancomicin becomes defunct we are in deep smelly stuff, unless we stop using it for a while or develope new antibiotics.

"Seems like there was good reason why people warned about getting tattoos, now I am gonna want to stay far from tattooed people because this thing is
contagious! EW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

The only reason why these people got sick was because the needles used were dirty. I would never get a tattoo with out knowing that they use
disposable needles. There is no reason to avoid people with tattoos that's just being ignorant.

The only person who i knew who got this was a bouncer at a night club who punched some punk in the mouth his tooth dug into his fonger and it got
infected. He has since lost his finger.

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